An autumn day

I love autumn mornings when the red and yellow leaves lie along on the creek and practically cover the water from bank to bank. I love to lay on the leafy ground in splendid isolation and look up into the nearly bare tree limbs and watch the final leaves release and fall, spinning slowly like feathers down through the indigo sky. Pale orange, red and brown oak and maples leaves lay scattered on the dewy grass. When I stand upright again, I see my shadow cast on the leaf-strewn grass like a stain.
I believe that each leaf that falls is a mark from the thumb of God.

Grief is a haunting

If you have ever lost someone you truly loved, no matter how many years pass by the loss remains a bitter ache. I have never entirely found peace about my loss and in my heart there has always been a little bit of war still waging all these years later. Grief is a haunting. You count days, then months, then years. You count birthdays and anniversaries but you agonize a little less with each passing event. Just a little, mind you. My loved one is a ghost that haunts me still, manifesting himself in the form of crushing despair-- less a poetic melancholy and more like the grim aftermath of a brutal beating and I'm still amazed to have survived. I still miss him, all these decades later, and it still hurts sometimes like it happened yesterday. He remains forever young as I continue to age; he will always be thirty. A great deal of who I am stayed back there, with him, in 1986. Now, later in life I can conclude an inevitable sense of failure, an overwhelming gloom in the knowledge that days, months and years, f ew that we had--are done and gone forever. But back then I simply exulted in the false but glorious knowldge that life would be exactly that way from thereon. I wasn't different from anybody else in that sense. I took youth, and the gifts I had as a special pact from God. Endings were not endings. Even now, in middle age, he recurs..like a fragrance. Have you ever pushed your nose into a fresh blossom and breathed deeply of the heavenly scent inside? My precious memories of that time with him are like that, only the flower of memory is withering and dry like the skin on the back of my hand. The scent is faded, different-- but it's still there and the blossom of those memories are pressed like a prom-corsage between the pages of my mind.

A piece of me has been lost and will never be recovered. It went away with him so long ago. It is something (not just someone) fatal piercing my life forever. I've learned to never squander those moments in the life I have now. I value them like collectors and their rare coins, only more. Much more. Coins are just that, coins. My life before is broken fragments and the memories are all I have; more precious than the oldest, rarest coin. Unlike a drop of blood in a bowl of milk they are still more persistent, like a stone thrown into a water as still and calm as a mirror.

What I've learned: Let yourself be happy and content, in case that what you have is all you will ever have. Don't lose what is precious to you in ingnorance and delusion. And anger is a poison and it will rise from you like smoke from a fire if you let it. Don't covet something else when what you have is all you need. I have chosen to walk further into the life given to me instead of staying paralized by my sadness and grief. What I lost has been given back to me, in another form and wrapped in a different parcel but even more precious than I could have ever dreamed possible. When you chose to go on, walk a new path-- even when you believe your life destroyed, and take steps of faith forward to the unknown and unchartered. You will find new-found pleasures you never knew could exist; The fragile dogwood, sumac and redbud that wither after the first frost, grim as death--soon push forward with new growth and vibrant color, inviting a new beginning. The stars will be sprayed once again across the indigo sky and the dew will glisten again on the apple-green grass.

If you were to die tomorrow, don't spend your last day cursing God but praise nature and the wonderous creation He gave us to set our eyes upon every day. When all you've loved and lost is seemingly gone forever, let what you held in your hand for a short while become sweeter in the mind; do not let go but hold on even tighter. Take your losses as no more than flesh wounds and walk on. Love what is left like there is no tomororrow. Yes, loss is damn painful but how can we experience joy if not given the purest moments of love, peace and serenity?

Grief still haunts me and will haunt me until I die but I have been given much more than I've lost and I chose to plant new seeds and watch them grow and when I'm gone the flowers of those seeds will leave their scent for others after me.

Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away

Memory is one of the strongest intoxicants. There have been occasions when I've become drunk-like when the past sweeps over me like stinging sheets of windblown rain. My memories rush over me with the velocity of heartbreak. I have, for that matter we all have all lost someone we have loved; life is all about love and the loss of love-- or more accurately the loss of people we love and the people that have loved us and the world always seems poorer for their absence. I have a problem aceding to the fairness of that; not that I have a choice.

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down; to sprinkle a piece of paper with inked letters which bleed from my heart and not the pen I hold so fiercly. Are the words captured or imprisoned when I make them travel from mind to keyboard, or from heart to paper? Memories shift over time, very similar to ink when dampness blurs their images on paper....therein lies my purpose. When I am gone, who will tell my story? Who will see my footsteps, remember the sound of my laughter? Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as wallpaper on the kitchen wall. Every bit as stationary, flat and still and harmless. Writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as it if were final.

Sometimes the strength of certain memories nearly knock me down with their force and I can hardly stand against the brunt of it, like walking full force into gale winds. They take my breath away. I must write now, I must mark these moments of my life, in ink or more frequently hammered on keybaord before I turn into an antique and the memories fade and blur. This in the hope that my effort will be worthwhile, that future generations of my family will take a piece of me, a fragment of my life and retell it and use it to flavor their lives like spices sprinkled in good stew.

A life is full of moments, good and bad, important and boring. I have found that the most important moments never fade from your memory and that you replay them in your mind over and over like a an old 45 record. They stand proof against time. Changeless and pure, authentic in ways impossible for anybody to change, ever.

We live in a broken world and everyone suffers. Our lives fall away into history--a cliche: like sands through an hourglass-- and much of who we are and what we accomplished will die when we die. Indeed, the fleeting nature of our instantaneous lives dictates that we pass through the land as briefly as water passes over the boulders in a canyon river.

Words I Live By

"Nulle Dies Sine Linea"
(Latin for "write every day!")

Some thoughts that can shape your future

Love is worth the risk of loss.

Anger harms no one more than he who harbors it.

Bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate.

Peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change.

Friends and family are the Blood Of Life.

The purpose of existence is caring and commitment.

Autumn Days and Crisp, Smoky Evenings

Hard to believe it's been a month since I've posted anything but it's representative of the little time I've had "left over" from my daily demands of work and family. It has been a great month, I think one of my favorite times of year, second only to Spring and new flower blossoms, new life. Fall is crisp and cool and the crunch of acorns underfoot, the golden colors of autumn's foliage....windows sprung open, migratory birds at the backyard feeders, football and holiday commercials on tv. Wait--it's not even Thanksgiving and Christmas commercials are on tv already?! What's with that? The commercialization of the holidays does in fact hit us earlier and earlier each year, an effort by the mega-stores to make more and more of (our) money!

Last night at dusk Richard, Catherine and I went to the boat ramp near our home and watched the sun go down over the water while Richard threw his cast net. My favorite Egret came for a visit and shyly stood near by waiting for handouts. The first two mullet went to him and then the next two went to a hungry swarm of feral cats that materialized out of the woods near the bank of the creek. Here are a couple pictures I took--not so great because the sun was almost all the way down and it was dark for good photography without a tripod.

I wanted to take the kayak out this weekend but was too lazy to get my aging body off our comfortable pillow-top mattress in time. Richard went out Friday afternoon and atested to the beauty of the dieing afternoon sun as it slipped beyond the marsh's grassy reeds where he paddled and fly-fished alone.

Autumn is:

Brown leather gloves and a wooly scarf

The crunch of acorns under my feet

The scent of clove and cinnamon

A good curl-up-with-an-afghan novel

Wooly socks

Good, red wine

Walks on leaf-strewn paths through the woods

Smoke curling from chimney tops

Pinecones

Brunswick Stew

Warm oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar

The smoky fog-breath swirling from my mouth in the cool of the morning

Football weekends

Fall Festivals/Carnival lights

An October visit to beautiful Minnesota farm country

Home-made apple pie

Pumpkin carving and Trick-Or-Treaters

A November full of birthdays

Scented candles

A crackling fire and roasting marshmellows

Thanksgiving turkey, mashed potoatoes and cranberries!

Mmmm....lots of good things to enjoy, treasure and be thankful for!